Having just reached 60 years of age my sporting achievements seem a long way behind me now but I have a significant golfing history and currently play off a handicap of 2.9. I stopped playing for about 7 years during my involvement in a restaurant business but prior to that I was a plus 1 golfer for almost 20 years.

Still decent on my day and when we are allowed to play again I’m hoping to be competitive at senior level nationally.
Time will dictate things as we have a few projects in the pipeline and golf is not high on the list anymore (much as I love it) but my wife is not too supportive having already been a golf widow (her words!).
I live about 20 mins from Machynys and I’m tempted to join as they have a hole named after me, or that’s what I tell people anyway …

I’m probably better known for some glorious defeats in golfing circles.

Frank Maliphant was a well known player of his day but a bit before my time.
I once joked at an event in Ashburnham that he was my ‘great uncle’ when somebody commented on it and a guy stepped out of the crowd watching us and said “Was he? He was my best friend and I played a lot of golf with him”. I had to talk my way out of that one sadly!

[Editor’s note: they are actually 5th cousins twice removed]

I can only supply rough dates on achievements as some of the lesser events I won are lost in the mists of time.
I won a few big events back in the day including 18 club championships at 3 different clubs – 8 at Morriston, 5 in Fairwood and 5 in Gower.
I won the Glamorgan County championship in 1991 at Pyle and Kenfig by 5 strokes and played for Glamorgan for 20 years.
I was county captain from 1999-2001 and the lowest handicap I recorded was +1.1!
I held 6 course records over the years but none are still in place unfortunately.

I played in the inaugural British Mid-Amateur Championship at Sunningdale in 1995, narrowly scraping through the qualifying rounds to reach the matchplay stages.
There I was drawn against the reigning Welsh Amateur champion and Sunningdale member in the first round and he played like an a*$e so I beat him comfortably.
In the second round I played a Canadian guy with anger management issues who basically beat himself so onto the third round and a match against one of the top amateurs of the time named Gary Wolstenholme.
Gary had won a couple of British Amateur championships and played in the US masters and Open on a few occasions.
I wasn’t favourite for this match but managed to get the 300+ crowd on my side because he’d pi$$ed them off by asking them loudly not to comment on a shot until it had stopped!
To cut a long story short he beat me narrowly (2&1) and went on to win the overall event.

He got selected for the Walker Cup team to play the USA in Royal Porthcawl later in the year.
On the first day he was drawn to play a certain Tiger Woods who was a three time US amateur champion.
He beat Tiger on the 18th and became the first to beat him in matchplay for a long time.
Tiger turned professional the following year, so I have therefore narrowly lost to the last person to beat Tiger as an amateur!

See what I mean – better known for my glorious defeats!

I was also Welsh Schools High Jump champion and played in goal for the Swansea City Youth team in 1977 and won the 1993 SKETTY Club snooker championship.